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krz9

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Posts posted by krz9


  1. On 12/30/2020 at 8:58 PM, Lurtz said:

    HI krz9. As someone who has never used an AI calculator before can you just confirm I am reading it correctly. If I go to your site and select Austria it shows an average difficulty of 96 and an average lap time of 1m 08.6564s. Does this mean that if my PB is 1m 08.6xx I should be setting the AI difficulty to 96? But what if my PB is 1m 09.6xx or 1m 07.6xx? How do I calculate what the AI needs to be set at? Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.

    Following up on my last comment. I made good use of the days off and published some of our time trial laps data. Check out this new page for Austria (or the list of all tracks here). You can enter your own laptime and benchmark it against average AI laptimes per difficulty level on that track. A laptime of 1:09.600, for instance, would result in a suggested difficulty level of 38. As a reminder, this is all based on Mercedes Time Trial data -- that's the only way to make data comparable.

    As I mentioned in my last post, you could alternatively (once you know your average "baseline" difficulty level) adjust your AI difficulty based on the average per-track difficulty adjustments. And/or track your own AI difficulty levels to see your own progress over time.


  2. 3 hours ago, Lurtz said:

    HI krz9. As someone who has never used an AI calculator before can you just confirm I am reading it correctly. If I go to your site and select Austria it shows an average difficulty of 96 and an average lap time of 1m 08.6564s. Does this mean that if my PB is 1m 08.6xx I should be setting the AI difficulty to 96? But what if my PB is 1m 09.6xx or 1m 07.6xx? How do I calculate what the AI needs to be set at? Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.

    Hi Lurtz - good question! There are different approaches to AI difficulty. None of which are perfect imo. Two that I've considered:

    1. Baseline difficulty + adjustments per track: once you have a sense for your average ("baseline") difficulty, you can then adjust it for each track based on how well you know/think you'll do. As an example, my own difficulty baseline is around 90 (meaning over the course of a season my average is about 90). For tracks I do well, such as Austria, I increase my difficulty by 5. For tracks I suck at, such as Vietnam, I decrease by 7. The page I've linked to is helpful with this approach, as it shows the average difficulty adjustment for each track.
    2. Laptime comparison: this approach is similar to what you've asked about. You first set your own laptime on a track, then compare it with some online benchmark which spits out the recommended difficulty. This works well if you're willing to always hop into Time Trial mode to set a few laptimes. It's important that you use Time Trial (and always the Mercedes), because laptimes depend on factors such as car performance, tire wear, engine mode, etc. Time Trial is the only mode that keeps those constant. If you'd set a lap in My Team Practice, for instance, you'd get a much slower laptime (e.g. because engine mode is lower, or because your car is weaker); and the slower laptime would then result in a lower suggested difficulty by any "difficulty calculator". Personally, I don't want to go to Time Trial each time I'm about to race a Grand Prix... hence I stick with approach #1.

    I'd love to hear if anyone has different approaches to this! With regards to the second approach, my friends and I are working on publishing our average laptime by difficulty data as well -- I'll post it here shortly, stay tuned. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help with - would love to hear more opinions on how to improve our data and make everyone's F1 experience better 🙂


  3. Jumping in here with my first comment. I loved reading this thread as I found that a good AI difficulty is a huge factor in having a good, immersive F1 game experience. In the past, I tracked my difficulty adjustments myself. Since I started discussing this with some friends we just ended up taking a few days to build a basic tool (F1Laps). It allows you to track your myteam/career progress & AI difficulty.

    The tool also calculates our average difficulty & difficulty adjustments per track, which we've published here: https://www.f1laps.com/pages/resources/f1-2020-game-difficulty-by-track (updates daily). Our adjustments are not super consistent with the calculator data -- I guess it's another case of each one of us having different track strengths & weaknesses, and not enough aggregate data yet to smooth out individual inconsistencies. 

    Personally, my own approach mostly relies on my previous seasons. I prefer setting the difficulty based on how I perform "realistically" - even if it's not consistent with the "average" driver.

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